I caught some of this movie on cable last night before The Wire and it's funny, I don't recall anyone watching it back in the day and saying "you know what, maybe the NSA should have totally unchecked surveillance power! That's be really useful, and by no means open to abuse!"
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Enemy of the State
18 Feb 2008 04:29 pm
Comments (25)
Hey, I just saw "Heat!"
1) Go back and watch the Denzel Washington/Bruce Willis Movie "The Siege" --about New York City being placed under martial law after Arab terrorist bomb attacks.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege
Especially the scene where Army commander Bruce Willis and CIA officer Annette Benning calmly discuss ways to make the captured terrorist in front of them talk --As FBI agent Washington looks on in horror:
Annette Benning: "Maybe the knife"
Special Forces Officer: "Ummm. Messy"
2)The scene in which Washington finds out that the terrorist cell was trained by THE CIA to carry out strikes in Iraq -- and is hitting America because it was cut loose by CIA and left to the tender mercy of Saddam Hussein -- is particularly hilarious.
Annette Benning: "We didn't ABANDON them ,exactly."
1) What's interesting is that "The Siege" came out in 1998 -- 3 years before 911. Pretty prescient.
I consider Tim K an enemy of the state.
Another "shoulda known better" moment comes from watching Daniel Day-Lewis in In the Name of the Father.
And I just saw Three Days of the Condor and...oh never mind.
Matthew, this is quite funny, but I really do think you should edit "that's" to "that'd" to make it a lot more effective.
Do you once-over your posts? I don't mean this in a pugnacious-blogospheric-snark way; I honestly think it would tighten the post up nicely.
William Gibson had some interesting thoughts on this on Radio Open Source a while back:
I've been watching with keen interest since the first NSA scandal surfaced. I've noticed on the Internet that there aren't many people who're really shocked about this. I think that what's going is that our popular culture, our real sort of 'dirt-ball street culture' teaches us from childhood that the CIA is listening to all of our telephone calls and reading all of our email anyway.
And I constantly see that as a response in sort of the 'lower discourse' of the Internet, people saying, "Oh, they're doing it anyway." In some way our culture believes that, and it's a real problem, because evidently they haven't been doing it anyway, and now that they've started, we really need to pay attention and muster some kind of viable political response, but it's very hard to get some people on board because they think it's a fait acompli.
So you see, not only should we be ranting against Hollywood's awful portrayals of the NSA as an Even-More-Awesomely-Super-Secret-CIA on grounds of shoddy scriptwriting, but also because it's hurting America.
Enemy of the State was an above average flick prior to 9/11, and obviously has gotten more interesting post-9/11.
The Siege, OTOH, is mushy pablum.
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I'll highly recommend Brazil as a good example of a movie which gained significant new meaning post-9/11.
IIRC, some of the bad guys in Sneakers are NSA.
I'd actually go so far as to say that the NSA is the new villain of choice. (As I recall, the "Paladins" of "Jumper" are NSA agents.)
The funniest part of this, of course, is that the NSA doesn't have secret agents that dress in black and murder people. That's the CIA's job /sarcasm. Bamford's book "Body of Secrets" is hardly complimentary to NSA; it admits that the number of actual agents who sneak around and do stuff is incredibly small (less than 100 people, I'm guessing).
Klug: NSA as the villain in the movie Jumper was carried over from the book, which has a copyright date of 1992. So I don't know that it constitutes a "new" villain of choice.
Good point -- perhaps a leading indicator?
The all star game was on before The Wire . Just because you can't (bear to?) see the awesomeness of King James doesn't mean you miss out on such a worthy game.
My favorite part of that movie was where they have a side-view picture of Will Smith with a bag, and use "image enhancment" to rotate the camera angle up and above the bag to see what's inside.
Other than what some Brit revealed a few years ago, we still don't know how Echelon works or how they get around the alleged prohibition on listening in on US conversations by merely allowing the Brits to do it instead.
Since Bush, presumably they don't bother with that end run any more.
NSA types posts I've read on Web sites always claim it's an absolute no-no to listen in on US intercepts. But the fact is, if it's going to be done, it's going to be done in another room on a "need to know" basis, and the average Echelon worker isn't going to be told it's going on. So their proclamations mean nothing.
I don't care what the spooks claim. The temptation is going to be overwhelming to listen in on "forbidden" intercepts, and it's going to be done.
You want to read some interesting stuff on intelligence matters, spend some time browsing around Cryptome:
www.cryptome.org
Holy shit, it's Lisa Bonet.
"Hey, I just saw "Heat!"
Posted by Jim Gaffigan | February 18, 2008 4:57 PM"
Perfect response.
More humorous, The President's Analyst, a '60s spy spoof with James Coburn, wherein the phone company turns out not only to be the power behind the throne, but working on nanotechnology capable of ultimately controlling everything.
We just watched The Importance of Being Earnest.
And now here's Obama. It's almost like it was meant to be.
Movies are better than fortune cookies.
I just saw EotS as well. One of the things that struck me was that it is quite an homage to The Conversation, a '70s film starring Gene Hackman, who brilliantly portrays a hyper-paranoid surveillance expert who is obseesed about maintaining his own privacy. A number of scenes in EotS are patterned very closely on key scenes from The Conversation, and Hackman's role in EotS is clearly a reprise of the earlier film. Which was better, by the way.
I watched The Shawshank Redemption yesterday. It was interesting that the warden was a bad guy because he put the protaganist in the hole (solitary confinement) for two months! The prisoners considered a week in solitary as horrible punishment. Contrast with Jose Padilla.
I watched The Shawshank Redemption yesterday. It was interesting that the warden was a bad guy because he put the protaganist in the hole (solitary confinement) for two months! The prisoners considered a week in solitary as horrible punishment. Contrast with Jose Padilla.
I spent two YEARS in "The Hole" at Leavenworth. Actually, two years, three and a half months.
And "D cell block" at Leavenworth is no joke. Forty degrees in the winter, 110 degrees or more in the summer. During the worst of the summer heat, they bring you ice twice a day so you don't simply die.
I spent maybe a total of three years or more in one "Hole" or the other during my eight years in the joint.
Both "The President's Analyst" and "The Conversation" were really good. Best scene in TPA was where the non-violent psychologist played by Coburn gets to fire an M-16 at The Phone Company security guards: "Take that, you hostile son-of-a-bitch!"
Comments closed March 03, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
sometimes the obvious just can't be stated often enough.
Posted by Max B. | February 18, 2008 4:40 PM